Stephen C Stratton, a youngster in the late 1970s, tattooed his buddies with a popsicle stick and taped sewing needles. At The Needle Master studio, he got his first professional tattoo, a Lambretta-scooter motif connected with the Mod revival subculture. Stratton joined the military and became a nurse a decade later. Because tattoos were frowned […]
Category: Storytelling
A Stranger in Town: Dark, Symbolic Compositions by Shane Pierce
Shane Pierce is an artist from Missouri (currently based in North Carolina) who describes his life and art as “nomadic”—travelling, working in different creative fields, and populating his oil paintings with skull-faced suitcase-toting wanderers ( “‘a stranger comes to town’ type of theme,” as he describes it in a fascinating interview with Beautiful Bizarre). With […]
Spectral Beasts in the Shadowy Fantasy Realms of Jade Mere
Jade Mere is a writer and illustrator with a passion for fantasy, science fiction, and the paranormal. Humans and animals are her favorite subjects, and this post features a selection of the latter. Just like the moonlit waters of Mere’s Pacific-Northwest home, the animals are filled with phosphorescence, light leaking from their eyes, mouths, and […]
Restless Spirits and Worlds Between: The Art of Jenna Andersen
Restlessness and uncertainty characterize the mesmerizing artwork of Jenna Andersen. Faceless figures, engulfed by vegetation native to her home state of Virginia, explore mysterious forests and yards. Ghosts peer statically over these spaces, voyeurs to a strange and untouchable world, watching time pass and reality warp, their feelings and identities hidden behind a sheet. Other […]
Alone in a Dystopian Landscape: Concept Art by Simon Stalenhag
Working in the field of concept art, Simon Stalenhag has conceived a whole world. Using his homeland of Sweden as a backdrop (and more recently, California), Stalenhag merges reality with fantasy, turning coniferous forests and snow-shrouded fields into the sites of alien encounters, apocalypse scavenging, and bloody cyborgian crimes. He spent a lot of time […]
Mortality and Sacred Snakes in the Dark Tattoo Art of Joao Bosco
Joao Bosco is a tattoo artist currently dividing his time between Los Angeles and London. He is recognized for his dark fantasy imagery influenced by both Japanese and American tattoo traditions. Featured here is a selection of his incredible snake tattoos, which are fuelled by his connection to the animal’s sacred symbolism. He is also […]
Shape-Shifters and Borderlands: Sculptures by Leah Brown
Leah Brown is a Fort Lauderdale-based artist creating sculptures and installations based on her lucid dreams, which she has journaled about since childhood. “I create work about the borderland between what is considered real and what is not,” she writes in her bio. “These works begin as illustrations, but become artifacts of invocation, and I […]
The Surreal Imagination of Angela He
Angela He is a nineteen-year-old artist currently at Stanford who is creating beautiful digital paintings and video games. Her style is imaginative and diverse, ranging from floral, sun-dappled portraits to personified moments of twisted, tender darkness. The mystical characters she creates are shimmering and translucent, emitting light and shadow from within. Her video games encompass […]
We Die to Become: Interview with The Ljilja
“Everyone carries a Shadow. And the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” These are the wise words of the Ljilja, a mysterious Switzerland-based artist. She is referring to Carl Jung’s conception of the Shadow: the unconscious “dark side” of the personality driven by our more unenlightened […]
Exploring Concealed Beauty: Mariamne Photography
The imagery of Spain-based Mariamne Photography is tender, ethereal, and melancholic. Much of her work is self-portraiture, which she describes as “an introspective journey through my own self, trying to express the fragility and complexity of human souls.” By incorporating subjects such as Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery) and the “red thread […]